Venezuela orders prison releases due to overcrowding in prisons

Venezuela's Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) has authorized this Sunday the release of prisoners to combat prison overcrowding.

© Provided by News 360An agent of the Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas Penales y Criminalísticas, the Venezuelan judicial police. - PRENSA CICPC

The president of the TSJ, Judge Gladys María Gutiérrez Alvarado, has informed that an "approach plan for the decongestion of preventive detention centers" has been implemented, according to a report published on the occasion of the first 100 days of her tenure in office.

 In addition, he explained that during these three months "numerous days of legal attention were carried out in penitentiary establishments in different regions of the country, holding judicial acts".

Gutiérrez has specified that the judicial acts carried out include preliminary hearings, trial openings, review of measures and granting of humanitarian measures, as well as alternative formulas for serving the sentence and redemptions for study and work.

The magistrate, in turn, has indicated that these measures have been taken with the participation of other bodies of the country's judicial system.

In this sense, the Minister of Penitentiary Services, Mirelys Contreras, communicated on Saturday that she had visited a preventive detention center --Delegación Anzoátegui-- where she would help to address the overpopulation of the same with the objective of providing "the full guarantee of Human Rights".

Contreras met with the Anzoategui State Police as part of the aforementioned program. "There are more than 150 subjects that are in the preventive retention centers of the regional Police that are being evaluated by the minister in order to provide celerity in the judicial processes", explained the police force in its Twitter account.